Untouched salmon

The future of commercial salmon processing will go online in Norway later this year when the machines take over a plant just north of the Arctic Circle.

If the operation proves successful – and there is every indication it will – Alaska should get ready to see yet another radical change in the labor-intensive business that helped shape the territory and fire the push for Statehood in the 1950s.

“The flow is controlled all the way from the holding pens via ‘stun & bleed’ further to the gutting machines where the salmon is gutted, weighed and photographed for inside quality grading. All registered information then follows each individual fish and makes it traceable until it reaches the customer. BAADER’s new ‘Speed feeder’ ensures efficient distribution to each of the new BA144 gutting machines and up to our new packing grader with a capacity of up to 160 fish/minute. When the plant is completed…it will be an important showcase for BAADER.”

Coming soon

Alaska fish processors face some hurdles in upgrading to similar systems, said Anchorage economist Gunnar Knapp, the retired director of the University of Alaska Anchorage Institute of Social and Economic Research.

But he has no doubts machines and robots will soon replace people on what has long been called the state’s “slime line.”

“Whether it’s three years, 10 years or 20 years,” Knapp said, “the era of people doing mindless, repetitive things is coming to an end. There is a lot of automation already.”

Knapp is a global authority on fisheries. He has toured fish processing plants in Scandinavian where there are already more people monitoring machinery than people up to their elbows in blood and guts on the processing line.

There are places, he said, where a handful of people take the place of a dozen. He envisions Alaska fish plants with 500 people taking the place of 5,000. Such a shift would mark an acceleration in a 100-year trend.

Dozens of salmon canneries once dotted Alaska’s coast, but they have increasingly consolidated over the decades and in recent times shifted steadily from canning fish to freezing them. Many small, coastal communities have suffered through the trend.

There is certain to be job fallout of some sort from further automation, but Knapp said it “could revolutionize it in a good way.”

Cheaper, more efficient processing holds the potential of upping the value to fishermen of the salmon they catch, and it could help end one current practice increasingly employed to drive down the cost of processing Alaska salmon:

Head and gut the fish in Alaska, then ship the carcasses to China to be filleted and deboned by cheap labor, possibly slave labor. The Associated Press reported in October that the China were recruiting impoverished North Koreans to process U.S. salmon.

The Koreans are forced to live in tightly controlled and monitored dormitories, wrote reporters Tim Sullivan, Hyung-Jin Kim and Martha Mendoza. “Privacy is forbidden. They cannot leave their compounds without permission. They must take the few steps to the factories in pairs or groups, with North Korean minders ensuring no one strays. They have no access to telephones or email. And they are paid a fraction of their salaries, while the rest — as much as 70 percent — is taken by North Korea’s government.”

One of the products identified as coming from the Chinese factories was “Sea Queen, Wild Caught Pin Salmon Fillets.” Once sold by Walmart, the fillets were reported to be sourced from Alaska and British Columbia pink salmon.

The traffic in salmon between Alaska and China has been going on for a long time, and it has grown steadily though this is seldom discussed in the 49th state.

Cheap labor

The Seattle Times more than a decade ago revealed salmon being shipped to China for processing.

“The business model is to attract the top producing harvesters, have them fish at full strength, pack the product in as quick and low-cost way as possible, and sell to China where further processing and distribution takes place.”

At a community level, however, things get more complicated. When 5,000 workers come into a community like Dillingham, they support more air traffic; they require more food and goods be brought in to support them; they usually spend some amount of money, no matter how small, in that community.

If a tenth as many show up, even if they are paid more, there is almost certain to be less revenue coming into the community.

That said, there is no stopping technological change. Knapp does, however, expect it to happen faster in Norway and Iceland than in Alaska. Farmed fish are easier for machinery to handle, although that is changing fast, too.

Machines can now scan fish, assess their size and even sort through the algorithm that directs them as to how to cut a certain size fish to minimize waste. The biggest problem Alaska processors might face, according to Knapp, is the unpredictability of Alaska salmon returns.

If a company borrows money to make a big investment in equipment and the fish don’t show, it still has to make the payments on the loans. It can’t cut costs the way it can with human employees: “Sorry, the fish didn’t show. There’s no work. You might as well go home.”

It’s simply not as easy for companies processing fluctuating returns of wild fish to employ technology as it is for farmers. And going forward, technology appears destined to just keep making fish farming more and more efficient and thus more economical.

New York-based Manna Fish Farms is planning raise striped bass in pens eight miles off the East Coast where the fish will be watched with undersea cameras and fed by a buoy that holds 20 tons of feed and can drop it into the pens on a schedule.

“It works from shore to feed fish. We can watch on it camera,” Donna Lanzetta, the Manna CEO, told Alan Lynch of Seafood Source. “Our goal is 100 percent transparency. You can go on a computer and watch our fish, so you’re assured we’re not harming the environment in any way, and we’re doing right by the ocean. We want to be a model for other farms to come.”

Thomas: do you ever think how such comments reflect on others who hold limited-entry gillnet permit like yourself? if you believe something in the commentary is off base, state it. but i’d suspect you just don’t like reading about the global state of the fishing industry these days. i can understand that frustration. the train has left the station where Alaskans stand wondering what happened. name calling doesn’t solve the problem. it is just an illustration of another of this state’s problems and, to a large extent, the nation’s: “you’re an idiot.” “no, you’re an idiot.” “no, i’m not. you’re the idiot.” “you’re wrong. you’re the edit.” ad infinitum. it’s the rhetoric of small minds. i’d hope for more from Alaskans.

Off topic here BUT breaking news is both Oprah and Ellen Degeneres have been impacted by the mudslides in Santa Monica.
This is right out of John Mcphees great book: The Control of Nature. This is right up your alley Craig. A Seussian tale of greed and destruction!

The economic wheels worldwide keep on turning. Alaska needs to start converting commfish permits into fish farming permits, double escapement goals into all rivers, and get as many commfish nets out of the water as humanly possible. Cheers –

If you wanted to minimize the costs of salmon fishing industry and make Alaska more globally competitive, you wouldn’t just automate the processing of fish that have been caught. You’d also process the catching of fish. This would be simple to do for salmon if Alaska went back to the methods used before statehood. The most efficient way to catch and manage a river’s fishery is by fish traps. With fish traps, coupled with automation, you could precisely control the escapement and the harvest of salmon. Of course, this would put all commercial salmon fishermen out of business. But maybe they could become fractional owners of the automated salmon industries. Dipnetters and sport fishermen would be allowed to continue their pursuits above the fish traps. And of course, dipnetters would continue to practice their time honored tradition of hissy fits and rants when they don’t catch as much fish as they think they deserve. But they would only have one entity to scream at instead of hundreds of commercial fishermen.

actually, James, you’d probably want to design the system so the dipnetters were downstream from the commercial operations. then they wouldn’t have much to bitch about. and in some places, for instance on the Copper River with fish wheels or on the Kenai River with a trap at Skilak Lake (something once actually proposed) it wouldn’t be hard to do this.
the problem, however – as you note – is with job displacement. you’d put a lot of commercial fishermen out of business in areas of the state where dipnet and rod-and-reel use of fish is significant. the concept of commercial fishermen becoming fractional owners of the Skilak Lake trap was proposed, and they launched a hissy fit as you call it.
i’m sure if you were to make some sort of similar offer to journalists at the moment, they’d jump at it. i’d happily take a percentage of the revenue from fake news, phony news, bad news, and some of the other shit labeled “journalism” these days.
and there are, of course, other ways to change the way fish are harvested in this state to increase the economic return to Alaska, but given the prevailing political winds the likelihood of any of those being discussed, let alone instituted, are small.
processors going to fully automated, robotized processing lines on the other hand? that will not be discussed. that will simply be instituted whenever the processors decide it is in their best interest. they are businesses. they have no responsibility to consider the interests of the state as a whole or of small communities.